Singing to the Choir
by FrankandJoe3
Summary: Dean finds out the truth about angelic choirs. Slight Destiel


**I don't know if Supernatural's covered it, but I've always heard of angelic choirs being involved in good situations, so I figured my first Supernatural fic should be a subtle Destiel fic about angels and singing. It will be very out-of-character, but please note I tried. **

**Disclaimer: I don't own Supernatural.**

* * *

In perfect time to the drum solo to claim the car's interior, Dean beat the flat of his plans against the steering wheel with honest enthusiasm, a grin rutted deep into his face. The hollow flat noise by slapping his hand to the leather seemed to know just how hard to play itself to imitate each individual drum strike with precision, not even having to think before each strike. Lips moving along to the song that sounded more natural than the pounding of blood in beat to his heart in his ears, the emerald eyes missed the emotionless gaze quizzically staring holes in the side of his face.

"Hello, Dean," at the voice, the brunette swerved with a cry of surprise, face tightening as the gruff tone registered in his mind.

"Hell, Cas! Warn a guy!" Dean leaned over and turned the radio down, looking the man beside him up and down to make sure he was in one solid piece—he was.

The silence was a regular occurrence between them, one of the things they shared more than anyone without being bothered by it. For Dean, the sound of the road beneath the Impala's tires was all he needed for a lifetime. For Castiel, it was the surge of the delicate heart protected beneath the Enochian transcribed ribcage. _This _silence though was short lived.

"Bobby said you would be tracking down the trident. This is a stupid idea," the angel blinked slowly, body facing forward but head turned a clear 90 degrees to face the driver, "It is well protected by god's strongest archangels. They would incinerate you the moment you entered the room."

The curved lips pursed in frustration, an angry sigh expelling from the freckled nose before Dean reached over and turned the volume back up again on the radio.

"I don't remember asking _you_," he huffed, a smile flickering out over his lips as he recognized the start of Bohemian Rhapsody.

Forgetting the angel stationed shotgun, he tapped out his hands in time to the beat with that wide grin falling back over his lips, oblivious to the blue eyes following the movements with furrowed eyebrows. The angel knew well enough to wait until the drumming softened before he spoke up.

"I was informed 'baby' can be a term of endearment if not referencing an infant, and this vehicle is quite old. Why do you strike it if you have such fondness of it?" his head tilted to the side, scrutinizing the apparent 'abuse'.

It took the driver a while to understand what exactly Cas was asking, but when it translated in his mind, he chuckled quietly to himself and quickly forgave the unannounced visit.

"I'm not abusing my baby. She likes it when I'm rough," he delicately stroked the wheel with a loving sort of glance that he tossed to his passenger, "Actually, I'm just uh… playing the beat. I figured you wouldn't want me singing, considering, well… you know…"

"I don't believe I do know. I have heard you sing before; it's quite pleasing," Cas blinked, head still cocked gently to the side.

Dean's eyes widened and he offered a half smile of amazement, his eyes going to road with a soft kind of glint nestled in their depths. He chuckled warmly.

"Ah, thanks, I think. But, I mean, angelic choirs? Aren't you supposed to be like, some fantastic singer or something?"

Cas' silence easily showed that he had no idea why Dean would think that, curling the weathered knuckles tightly around the wheel, easing the turn gently.

"C'mon, there has to be _some _truth to that. Almost every Christmas special has some angels singing in choirs with all that magical light on their halos," for a moment, there seemed to be a plea on the edge of the man's voice.

It was almost as if he understood how little of a childhood he had and it frustrated him because he didn't get why _he _didn't get to enjoy all the lies like everyone else, up until he found a piece of truth he had clung to and enjoyed. Finding out that it might've been a lie gave him the friendly reminder on why he hadn't let himself have a regular childhood. The truth hurt a loss less to know from the beginning than to be fed lies over the years.

"We do not have choirs, Dean."

The brunette found himself at a loss for words nonetheless. This was that one childhood lie he had let get himself excited over, because this whole time he had been nervously racking up the nerve to ask _his _angel, the one that gripped his tight ass and pulled it straight from Perdition, to sing for him. It was going to be one of his guilty pleasures, he had imagined, because a part of him had just known that angels were the best singers and he'd just lay there on his side of the bed as Cas would sing him to sleep on those rough nights he couldn't go under on his own.

"Oh…" the hurt raised his voice just barely in pitch before he coughed it even again, "Can you uh… can angels sing then? At… all?"

Castiel could do more than hear the hurt in that shaky tone parting the frown on the man's lips beside him. It didn't matter that Dean wasn't fond of admitting it, but the Impala's occupants shared a profound bond without much explanation that allowed the Winchester's feelings to radiate off into the angel's subconscious when he felt like listening in on them. The feelings to seep in stung a little, to say the least, kind of like stepping on a flame in weathered shoes or pricking your finger on a sewing needle.

Feeling the same pain that Dean was, his blue eyes pooling to fill with this new borrowed emotion, the celestial being living within Jimmy Novak's vessel knew he had messed up somewhere in the past few sentences. It wasn't offense that cast the emerald eyes wayward though—it almost felt like betrayal, but it was cast towards someone who was long gone by now. This was the work of a long told lie unfolding in this hurt man's mind, and that kind of pain Cas knew without having to ration off the other's emotion.

Desperate to figure out what it was that was making all these bad emotions filter off at such a speed, the blue eyes squinted and roamed nonchalantly along the length of the driver's body. There wasn't exactly anything being looked for, just some words that weren't being said.

"I have never had a reason to express my emotions through vocal alteration," he finally remembered a question had been asked, his eyes now fighting to regain the attention of the ones glued to the road, "What troubles you?"

As he stared harder, the angel recognized the expression on the driver's face as what Sam called a 'pout', following it up until the radio was cranked a little too high for comfort. It stung a bit in the ears, for Dean at least, urging him to press harder on the gas and surge along the road. Cas sighed softly, turning his attention to the radio and willing it down a few notches to a comfortably loud volume.

"Would you… feel… better… if I sang?" he asked, loud enough to be heard but not enough to drown out the radio.

Dean put in his Kansas cassette tape with a set jaw.

"Sing and find out."

The rest of the car ride was driven in utter silence, factoring out the blaring radio, with Cas emotionlessly staring holes into the side of the brunette's face until a quick racing semi collided head on with the 1967 Chevy Impala and it exploded in a blinding flash of white light.

* * *

Andrea Matson had been on the night shift at St. Luke's hospital going on five years now, signing on immediately after her son's fall to cancer, and she had no mind to quit quite yet. At 38, she still had a prime of her life to find and live through, and she was content with that prime being her nightly stroll through the wards to make sure all of the patients were content and happy—or at least as much as they could be considering the circumstances.

This was her final round for the night, shutting the door to Mable Hanson's room with a sweet goodnight call, when a muffled crash sounded at the end of the hall. Andrea didn't panic though. Jeremy Milligan had a room down there, and after his brother was kidnapped, he had lost his mind in insisting the man had been 'possessed'. He was probably just having another fit. Another few minutes could be spared, surely, she decided as she pulled her long brown locks down from the bun that held them up.

"Is everything alright, Danny?" she asked sweetly as she opened the door across the hall, offering a brilliant grin to the little boy tucked snug into the hospital bed.

When he sleepily nodded, a yawn splitting his grin, she chuckled and asked him to not let the bed bugs bite before closing the door behind her. What a sweet boy. She couldn't help but pray that his surgery tomorrow was a success. Starting to head for Jamie's room diagonal form her position, already prepping the southern accent that made the old woman giddy straight to her core, she found her tracks stopped dead.

From that room at the end of the hall, the same one that held the muffled crash, she heard a high pitched bout of children's laughter that she could place in a second. That was her son's laugh. Soon to follow it, slurred out by the walls, she recognized her father's soothingly deep tones that soon fell in time to the small giggles. Her father had been dead fifteen years longer than her son. There wasn't a beat left for her heart to give.

"D-Dustin…? Daddy?" she gasped out, tears welling largely in her eyes.

There was a near limp to her step, weighed down from the disbelief clutching at her ankles, her wide amber eyes never leaving that room. The sounds just progressively got louder until a steady dog's pant joined them, one that sounded enough like her high school pet to rush shivers down her spine.

"Shaun," her fists trembled, blinking down a tear slowly as her limp became a brisk jog.

It wasn't until she heard Tom Jones' voice, a gentle suede sort of sound, that she _ran _down the linoleum hall, throwing open the door to the deserted ward with the crooked 711 on its center. She wasn't sure what it was that she expected, but it definitely wasn't this.

* * *

Just seconds ago, Dean had been gasping desperately from the pain to rack his body into Cas' trench coat, grasping at whatever his fingers could to numb the pain that started from his toes and rocketed up into his brain. His fibula was protruding largely from his knee cap and his ankle was facing the wrong way, missing a large portion of his thigh. If that wasn't enough, he had a good half of a reflector launched right above his hip bone. Every breath had been hitched in agony, every blink a desperate plea for it all to end.

The angel wasn't in his best shape either, to say the least. Having used the last of his mojo to carry himself, Dean _and _the Impala that meant so much to his hunter out of the crash, he wasn't even in a good enough situation to hold his _head _up. Blood poured from his nose, tracing down his chin to the pool of their mixed blood on his lap. Tears were hard in his eyes, but he wouldn't cry even if he could. Instead, he clutched Dean to his chest like it was his last chance of making it out of this situation.

Every choking sound to leave the brunette's lips left the angel weak and trembling because he could _feel _every single throb that Dean did, but it was the emotional fear of it all that had his own chest surging out in desperation. He had to calm the hunter down until help came. There was nothing else he could do.

"I'm right here," he muttered into the blood stained hair, hesitating before kissing it, an action he had watched Dean perform on a trembling woman that had eased her trembles a little, "Shh…"

He closed his eyes as tight as they would go, and almost immediately, he knew what he could do. He was going to sing.

"I am going to sing for you, Dean… Focus on me… keep breathing," Cas found himself praying again, but he wasn't praying to anyone but the wrecked frame in his arms.

When his lips parted, the kind of singing the convulsing brunette had expected didn't leave them. Instead, a golden light surged up and replaced the darkness in the heated cavern and then, Dean smiled.

The sounds he heard were the most beautiful ones he ever had.

There was his mom, singing him a lullaby in a whisper voice that wasn't exactly harmonic, but it meant so damn much back then and even now because she didn't want to wake Sam up and she wanted him to get to bed. There was Sam with a bountiful chuckle, recent from the gruff tones at the back, the edges tweaking to show how much pain he had just let go of to enjoy the world for what it was at. There was the Impala's engine out across the highway, every single one of those cassette tapes overlapping with the three Winchester's dual off-key tones blaring along in time to it.

There was a doorbell, the sound he had always secretly loved hearing because it meant they had a home and people wanted to see them. There was the gentle sizzle of steam off a pie fresh from the oven, made for a casual family dinner and set out to cool so no one would get hurt with so much love put into the casual twelve inch span. There was Bobby, a chuckle on his lips as he beamed proudly at his two boys because they had done something _good _and actually helped the world, killing the monsters rather than _being _them.

And then, there was Cas. There was that innocent voice, so chocked full of confusion that it was impossible to guess it was an angel of the _Lord _spitting it all out, with that breathtaking undertone that left him shivering and helpless because sometimes he forgot that Jimmy Novak wasn't Cas—rather Cas was a giant celestial being the size of the Chrysler building with enough power to kill him in a blink of an eye, but he kept him alive through all the shit they had been together because they had that _bond _that no one could quite explain.

Dean sat there, a cheesy grin unfolded over his lips as he subconsciously struggled with the blood pooling in his throat, his leg needing immediate repair, but he was happy. He was laughing. He was dying, he was hurt, he was in the worst kind of pain—but he was laughing, and Cas couldn't be any happier.

When the door to the room opened, the angel looked up with hope written out over his blood features, oblivious to how the light from the open door cast out his wings onto the darkened hospital walls and threw them out over the broken glass of the window behind them.

A nurse stood there, obviously hearing his singing as he put all the strength he could into it, horror fading into her features as she saw the state the two of them were in. And to think, she couldn't even see the car resting atop a tree outside.

Her amber eyes traced along the body Castiel clutched tight to his own before following out his wings, and suddenly, she understood with a quick nod. Andrea, her name was, Cas figured out with a tilt of his head, and she was going to save his Dean. The angel watched this nurse take the man from his arms, helpless but to keep singing as she laid him on the bed with wheels safely and securely.

With the thought that his last vision would be Dean being stolen from him, Cas desperately reached out towards the woman in white. To his surprise, she took his hand and helped him up onto the mattress beside his injured friend and let him put his arm tight around the injured chest.

"You work your magic, and I'll work mine," she promised with an accent of a smile.

The angel gasped in surprise before he nodded, a hint of a smile on his lips before he laid his head beside Dean's and kept his song quiet, feeling it grow more and more beautiful as a sort of serenity settled into the Winchester's features and his emerald eyes blinked slowly up into Cas' big blues.

"I feel… better already," he lied, but from the laugh to follow the tone, he had obviously been teasing.

Though he still struggled with the joking concept, Cas nodded and held up his small smile again. The light poured from this smile and he ran his hand across Dean's stubble, the light brightening once a bloody hand entwined with his own. It never quite stopped, even after the two had been rushed into the ER, because angels never slept.

Instead, the celestial being trapped within the trench coat and trapped within the emotions he had siphoned from Dean as the consciousness had left those beautiful green eyes, kept his lips moving the whole time, up until the final stitch had been cast. Only then did he let his smile fall shut and let his eyes sweep over the hunter he was going to watch over until time could tell their story no more.

* * *

**-F.J. III**


End file.
